Weekly Off-Topic Thread #257

Weekly Off-Topic Thread #257

Well it's now Saturday and noone has started the new thread so I figured I might as well. It's cold here, down in the 40's right now and supposed to get down into the 30's tonight. I'm so not ready for winter.

” Auto racing, bull fighting, and mountain climbing are the only real sports … all others are games.”- Ernest Hemingway

Re: Weekly Off-Topic Thread #257

I had a business conference in California from 9/16-9/21, but I drove there, so I left on 9/11. After the conference, I went on vacation for 2 weeks, so I'm just now getting back.

I went up to Idaho Falls and visited the Craters of the Moon national monument, and then went over to Yellowstone national park for 3 days. I took hundreds of pictures in both locations. I'll post a few here when I get a chance.

Also visited my uncle in New Mexico.

Total drive was about 5000 miles. Good to be home, though -- I finally get to sleep in my own bed again.

Re: Weekly Off-Topic Thread #257

A few pictures from Yellowstone ... the scenery there is amazing. If you haven't been or haven't been in several years, you need to go. There's a reason that it's our largest and most famous national park.

Re: Weekly Off-Topic Thread #257

*The views and opinions expressed on this forum are purely my own. Any product claim, statistic, quote, or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider, or party.

Re: Weekly Off-Topic Thread #257

*The views and opinions expressed on this forum are purely my own. Any product claim, statistic, quote, or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider, or party.

Re: Weekly Off-Topic Thread #257

Great images S.J. Nice sharp with really good color. Oh me.....hearing your story and seeing your photos brought so many memories of our days on the road. I think most of you know that my wife and I lived in our motorhome and traveled the U.S. & Canada for 16 years. I remember standing around Old Faithful....with the crowd waiting for it to go off. People would be saying to each other "it's not going to go off." or "I think we missed it". But, of course....it did go up in a magnificent display. There are geysers there that are larger and shoot higher in the air than Old Faithful....but most of them erupt much less often and are irregular so they never know when they are going to pop off.

Anyway....S.J......your pictures gave me the old itch again. Gosh I'd like to go back and visit some of the spots we enjoyed so much years ago. AND....of course now I have my newer, digital cameras and sharper lenses.

Thanks much for posting them. If you are of a mind to do so I'd like to see more.....perhaps some you shot in Craters of the Moon.

P.S. Date 1967 - Craters of the Moon in Idaho. We camped here. Kids were young and these were our tent camping days and also using the back of the station wagon.

This is a scan of a 35mm Ektachrome. Unfortunately stored, over many years, in horrendous conditions of extreme heat and cold plus high humidity. Film transparencies really take a beating and deteriorate severely under those conditions. By the way, I broke my right ankle hiking in this park. Yep....THAT rugged. Yes...this is color film. But Craters of the Moon is all volcanic debris and is really almost colorless except for the women hikers with bright colored clothing. There is almost no vegetation there. These are NOT volcanos. Rather they are called cinder cones. Many eruptions here over millions of years but not the super violent kind that builds mountains.

The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other peoples' money........Margaret Thatcher

*The views and opinions expressed on this forum are purely my own. Any product claim, statistic, quote, or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider, or party.

Re: Weekly Off-Topic Thread #257

*The views and opinions expressed on this forum are purely my own. Any product claim, statistic, quote, or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider, or party.

Re: Weekly Off-Topic Thread #257

Nice photo, Phil. Can't believe that's from 1967. I will post some of the Craters of the Moon photos here tonight.

The Canon 40D is awesome. Fantastic camera, and shooting in RAW is unbelievable. You can do anything you want to the picture after the fact. All of those I posted above were tweaked for exposure, brightness/contrast, white balance, color, and lens effects (wide/telephoto distortion and chromatic aberration). The photos were then reduced in size (those are about 700x450, the originals are about 3800x2700 (10 MPix)), and converted to JPG.

The only things that RAW can't fix after the fact are focus and adding certain lens filter effects like a circular polarizer.

I tell you, I was always impressed with the photos I got out of my 35mm film Canon EOS 10S camera, but the digital 40D just blows it away.

Re: Weekly Off-Topic Thread #257

SJ - your Morning Glory Pool picture is one of the best that I've seen. I looked for comparable ones on Flickr, to use as my desktop background and yours was as good as any and better than 90% of them. The one here was too small. I finally found a Flickr one the right size (that wasn't use restricted) but it was not nearly as good as yours.

The first Old Faithful photo contains more than just Ol' Old Faithful ... I see what looks like three other Geyser's steaming behind it The NSPS website has a reference photo (and webcams):

*The views and opinions expressed on this forum are purely my own. Any product claim, statistic, quote, or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider, or party.

Re: Weekly Off-Topic Thread #257

Download this for the Morning Glory Pool wallpaper. There's two uncompressed TIFFs in that .zip file, one for 16:10 monitors, sized at 1920x1200, and one for 16:9 monitors, sized at 1920x1080.

Morning Glory Pool used to have a deep, midnight blue center and went all the way to bright red algae/bacteria at the edge. Over the years, as people have thrown coins and rocks in it, they've clogged some of the water passages at the bottom of the pool, so the water no longer gets as hot as it used to. This caused the center of the pool to go to a green rather than the deep midnight blue. Also, the copper and zinc from the coins changed the water chemistry, and the red algae/bacteria no longer grows on the edge of the pool, only the orange algae does now.